Field
The present disclosure relates to methods and systems for handling, by the operating system of personal computing devices, authentication credentials used by credential management applications.
Description of Related Art
Users with personal computing devices such as computers, smartphones, or tablets commonly access their accounts online with service providers by providing authentication credentials to a webpage or application associated with the service provider. Examples of these service providers include banking and other financial services, social networking providers, online retail stores and services, and media content providers, among others. Authentication credentials typically include a login name and a password or code that is a combination unique to the user and for the service provider. It is often difficult for users to remember all of their login name and password combinations for the multiple service providers they use. Thus, in order to handle the multiple passwords, a variety of credential management applications exist that securely store multiple authentication credentials and provide the credentials when a user is attempting to access a corresponding service or website. These credential management applications typically consume large amounts of computer resources as they ideally operate continuously in the background. Also, credential management applications often collect and store large amounts of network traffic information, such as web site browsing data, raising privacy and security concerns for users. Due to limited computational capabilities of mobile devices, however, in some instances credential management applications may freeze or simply stop working, missing potentially important credential request events as the user attempts to access certain websites. Also, security concerns are raised when the user's authentication credentials are transmitted over a computational layer that is accessible to other applications or to malware, such as where the user's login name or password is placed on a clipboard from which the data can easily be lifted by another application. Thus, the secured information may be vulnerable to attacks when in transit from the credential management application running in the application layer to a web browser application of the user device.